Tibicena

Also Known As: also tibiçena, tibizena, tibicenes, tibisena; an Amazigh feminine plural, apparently “the black ones”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Spanish Mythology, Berber/Amazigh Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: An apparition that took whatever animal form it pleased, most often a very large woolly dog, and that came by day as readily as by night.
Role in Mythos: In pre-conquest Gran Canaria it was the shape the malign wore when it wanted to be seen, named in the plural rather than as any single being.
Relation to Humans: It showed itself to the islanders openly and often, and the early chronicles record no attack, no death and no remedy, only the sighting. The one defence in evidence is linguistic, a deliberately roughened pronunciation of a name believed to carry the thing it named.

At noon on a Gran Canaria hillside the light comes down hard and flat, and shadows shrink to nothing under the loose stone of the barrancos. That is when the thing was most often seen. Not at midnight, not at a crossroads, but in ordinary daylight, standing where a dog that size had no business standing. Very large. Woolly. Wrong.

Everything known about the tibicena comes from men who arrived to conquer the island and stayed to write about it. Pedro Gómez Escudero, a chaplain present at the conquest of Gran Canaria, set down that the demon appeared to the islanders many and frequent times, by night and by day, in the form of a very large woolly dog, and in other various shapes, and that they called these apparitions tibiçenas. Juan de Abreu Galindo, writing around 1590, gives almost the same sentence. Tomás Marín de Cubas, in 1694, adds the detail that ruins the tidy picture: alongside the woolly dogs came birds, a turkey-hen, a hen with chicks, a calf.

So the tibicena was never simply a dog. It was whatever the malign chose to wear, and what it chose most often had four legs and a heavy coat.

The name is stranger than the creature. In the Amazigh speech of the islands, tibicena is not a proper noun at all but a feminine plural adjective, and Ignacio Reyes García, who compiled the historical and etymological dictionary of that language, traces it to the consonantal root behind the Berber words for black: Kabyle ibrik, Rif berrken, Tashelhit bexxen, and the adjective aberkan, black or dark, which in figurative use means wicked and dangerous. Read that way, tibicena means the black ones. A description, in the plural, doing duty as a name.

There is a reason it reaches us mangled. Across Amazigh languages the words for black attract taboo and substitution, and speakers bend them rather than pronounce them cleanly, on the understanding that the word carries some of the freight of the thing. The form preserved in the chronicles is the shape of a word that has been deliberately roughed up. The name is a euphemism that got old enough to be mistaken for a name.

For the body itself the early texts give two adjectives and stop. Very large, and lanudo: woolly, shaggy, thick-pelted. Nothing about the eyes. The fiery red eyes and long black fur that fill modern retellings are later furniture, though the darkness at least has the etymology standing behind it. What the chronicles convey is bulk and texture, an animal read first by its coat and only afterwards by its face, at a distance that never quite closed.

Leonardo Torriani, an Italian military engineer surveying the islands for Philip II around 1590, left the one scene in which islanders use the word about each other. Among the Canarians, he wrote, there had been men of great valour, one of whom was called Atazaicate, meaning spirited and great of heart, but because he was ugly the women called him Atabicenen, that is, savage, or woolly dog, since tebicena in their language denotes the dog. It is a small, brutal piece of village life, and it survives because Torriani had a thesis. He wanted the island’s own language to explain the island’s name, and a word meaning dog was exactly what that argument needed.

He needed it because the name was already ancient and already canine. Pliny the Elder, drawing on the lost account of King Juba II of Mauretania, records that the island of Canaria took its name from its multitude of dogs of enormous size, two of which were shipped back to the king. Whether Juba’s informants had it right or not, dogs and this archipelago have been tangled together on the page since the first century. Reyes García reckons Torriani pressed the canine meaning harder than the evidence allows, and that the older sense of the word is simply blackness.

The record is silent on where the tibicenas came from. No parentage, no origin, no birth. The popular modern account, the one on the tourist boards and in the retellings, makes them the offspring of Guayota, whelped during the long night when the sun was carried off into the mountain. It is a satisfying story and it appears in none of the early chronicles. Guayota belongs to Tenerife, where both Torriani and Alonso de Espinosa recorded it as the name of the demon inhabiting Echeyde, the hell the islanders located inside the peak of Teide. Tibicena belongs to Gran Canaria. Joining them into a father and his hounds is a twentieth-century synthesis across two islands and two vocabularies, and it deserves to be read as one.

What the tibicena could do was appear. That sounds thin until the emphasis in the chronicles registers, because the thing they thought worth repeating was not the harm it did but the frequency. Many and frequent times, day and night, in this shape and in others. It did not lurk and it did not wait for dark. Reyes García reads the tibicenas as guardian figures fixed to particular places, drawing their vitality from the fear of anyone who came onto ground they were not permitted to enter, which suits a creature whose whole function is to be seen.

Its limits are the mirror image of that. No islander in the record kills one, drives one off or outwits one. There is no charm, no iron, no threshold it cannot cross, because there is no tale for such a defeat to happen in. The only countermeasure anyone seems to have practised was the bent pronunciation that kept the word at arm’s length. In the end the tradition itself proved the weak point: the conquest ended the religion that had room for the black ones, and the word carried on without the belief. It surfaced in Canarian letters instead. In Juan del Río Ayala’s 1947 play Tirma, Arminda lifts a dog and a he-goat on her palm and speaks a solemn conjuration against the tibisenas. The next year, in a Las Palmas newspaper, the same writer insisted that the shapes living in the great pine of Teror were not infernal tibirenas at all, not gigantic bellowing goats, not monstrous dogs slavering with rage. He had to say it. Somebody still thought they were.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tibicena?

A tibicena is a demonic apparition from the pre-conquest beliefs of Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, described by the chroniclers of the Castilian conquest. It was said to show itself most often as a very large woolly dog, by day as well as by night, and also in other animal shapes including a turkey-hen, a hen with chicks and a calf.

What does the name tibicena mean?

Tibicena is not a personal name but a feminine plural adjective in the Amazigh language of the pre-Hispanic Canary Islands, and Ignacio Reyes García’s etymological dictionary of that language traces it to the Berber root meaning black, giving a sense close to “the black ones”. Leonardo Torriani, writing around 1590, instead claimed the related word tebicena simply meant “the dog”, a reading that served his argument about where the name Canaria came from.

Were tibicenas the children of Guayota?

Not according to the early chronicles. Guayota is a Tenerife word, recorded by Torriani and by Alonso de Espinosa as the name of the demon dwelling in Echeyde, the hell the islanders placed inside the peak of Teide, while tibicena is a Gran Canaria word. The familiar account that makes the tibicenas Guayota’s offspring, born during a long night, is a modern synthesis joining two separate island traditions.

What did a tibicena look like?

The early accounts give only a very large dog with a woolly or thick-matted coat, and say nothing at all about its eyes or its precise colour. The fiery red eyes and long black fur found in modern retellings are later additions, although the darkness is at least supported by the meaning of the name itself.

How do you defeat a tibicena?

No account records anyone killing, driving off or outwitting a tibicena, and the chronicles preserve no charm or ritual against it. The only practice that resembles a defence is linguistic: the name survives in a deliberately deformed pronunciation, in keeping with a wider Amazigh habit of bending the words for black rather than saying them plainly, on the understanding that a word carries something of the thing it names.